Rail transport

Rail transport is a means of conveyance of passengers and goods by way of wheeled vehicles running on rail tracks. In contrast to road transport, where vehicles merely run on a prepared surface, rail vehicles are also directionally guided by the tracks they run on. Track usually consists of steel rails installed on sleepers/ties and ballast, on which the rolling stock, usually fitted with metal wheels, moves.

a TEN-YEAR-OLD lad in Indianapolis who was arrested for picking up coal along the side of railroad tracks is now in jail. If the boy had known enough to steal the whole railroad he would be heralded as a Napoleon of finance.

chicago News, reported in Locomotive Engineers Journal: Volume 33 (1899), p. 69. This quote has been variously modified and reported with the general sense that a poor or uneducated person may steal something trivial from the railroad and be punished for it, while a wealthy or educated person may steal the railroad itself and be praised. See, e.g., Mary Harris Jones, Autobiography of Mother Jones (with Mary Field Parton; 2004), p. 46: "I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator." The origin of the sentiment is often erroneously attributed to Theodore Roosevelt.

If the workers took a notion
They could stop all speeding trains;
Every ship upon the ocean
They can tie with mighty chains.

Joe Hill, reported in David Burner, Virginia Bernhard, Stanley I. Kutler, Firsthand America: A History of the United States (1998), p. 709.

The Erie railroad kills 23 to 46; the other 845 railroads kill an average of one-third of a man each; and the rest of that million, amounting in the aggregate to that appalling figure of 987,631 corpses, die naturally in their beds! You will excuse me from taking any more chances on those beds. The railroads are good enough for me.

Every person of any experience in Courts of justice, knows that a scintilla of evidence against a railway company is enough to secure a verdict for the plaintiff. I was once in a case before a most able Judge, the late Chief Justice Jervis, in which I was beaten, I dare say rightly, in consequence of an observation of his: "Nothing is so easy as to be wise after the event."